


Remainders and Reminders

by tuesday



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Drinking, Exes, F/F, Grief/Mourning, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-10-06 23:22:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17354576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/pseuds/tuesday
Summary: A few weeks after the events of the film, Liv shows up on May's doorstep with several bottles of wine to drink and talk.





	Remainders and Reminders

**Author's Note:**

  * For [phnelt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/phnelt/gifts).



> This is a gift fic for chocolate box!
> 
> Recip, all your prompts were amazing. This is a sort of take off of, "Dr. Octavius said only friends call her Liv and Aunt May called her Liv. What's up with that? (it's exes, that's what's up)" and your like, "respect towards exes," plus a bit of post-canon/canon stuff.
> 
> Thanks to N for the help with this!

It was an amicable break-up, or as amicable as a break-up could be when one’s ex went off to work for a corrupt business tycoon for the benefits and became a supervillain in her own right while one’s nephew was a superhero who often had to stop her. Liv kept May’s love letters, or at least didn’t let her know if she threw them all away. May kept any number of the projects they’d poured loving hours into on all the date nights they’d decided to stay in. Some of them, she repurposed for Peter. It was a help, but it only took him so far.

A few weeks following the public announcement of Peter’s death and their universe’s near collapse, once the heat had died down a little, Liv showed up on her doorstep with a canvas bag filled up with bottles of wine and that faintly regretful expression she'd had when she’d said it wasn’t working. The construction on May’s house was ongoing, but the major holes had been patched up enough for her to move back in. May moved aside from the door and let Liv inside.

“The glasses are in the same place,” May told her.

“You never did like change.” Liv’s smile was fond, but May wasn’t really feeling it.

“It hasn’t treated me well.”

Liv’s wince was subtle, but present. She poured generous portions of the red for them both. She gave May a mug filled to the brim. She’d remembered May’s favorite, a pale, soft blue with a tiny chip in the handle from when Peter was still learning how to modulate his strength and couldn’t be trusted with the dishes. It had been a gift from Ben. May had never had the heart to throw it away. She’d always had trouble letting go.

“Make yourself at home.” May nodded to the rickety kitchen chairs that had survived, but not without casualties.

Liv waited for May to sit down first. She never had liked to make the first move. May had had to tell her point blank that she was interested in dating. May sighed and dropped into a chair.

Liv sat almost delicately, filled with that same ethereal grace that, paired with her casual, dorky aesthetic and deeply nerdy interests, had attracted May in the first place. She took a pointed sip of her wine. May knocked back a third of hers.

Liv frowned. “That’s a three-hundred dollar bottle.”

“And you knew it would be wasted on me when you brought it.”

“I wouldn’t say wasted.” Liv retrieved the bottle and set it down on the table. “Look.” She cleared her throat. “I didn’t know it was Peter.”

“I know.” If Liv had, there was nothing, no force in the world, that could’ve stopped May from utterly destroying her. They’d been together for years. They knew each other’s weak points, big and small. May’s biggest one was gone, now. Liv’s vulnerabilities remained. “And I know you weren’t the one to do it.”

They made their way through the first bottle, and Liv brought out another. Somewhere around the third one, Liv said abruptly, “Do you remember that time he fell down the stairs, just tripped over his own feet?”

May’s lips twitched at the memory. “He was sick, and his foot tried to stick to the top step.”

Liv laughed. “I don’t know how I didn’t see it.”

May drank another mouthful of the wine, not even tasting it anymore. “When he was first figuring out his powers, I found him stuck to the ceiling, like one of those little frogs that like to hang out on the windows in the summer. He’d wriggled halfway out of his shirt trying to get free.”

“To Peter.” Liv held out her own mug, an ugly tan affair with the words emblazoned in black across it: World’s Best Girlfriend.

May tapped her blue mug against it. “To Peter.”

Time passed kind of hazily. At one point, Liv said, “The new kid.”

“Anything happens to him, I really will go on that murder spree,” May said in fair warning. It was only MJ camping out in her guest room that first week and the real, physical reminder of Peter’s life, his choices, the things he’d have wanted, that had kept her from going on one already. “He’s just a kid.”

“Aren’t they all?” Liv’s lips twisted with something bitter, something self-directed.

Around bottle four or five, an accomplishment considering neither of them had superpowers, only intelligence, curiosity, and the drive to do something with the both, Liv listed into May’s side. They had migrated to the floor. Liv slurred, “Oh, I miss you.”

“I’m not the one who left.” The words were said philosophically. The sting had long since faded.

“I was an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot, but you are very, very drunk.” May’s own words had to be enunciated carefully.

“Was. Didn’t say I still am.”

May drained the dregs of the last open bottle. She set her mug with great deliberation on the floor. Maybe Liv wasn’t, but May really, really was. “The guest room’s open if you want to spend the night. You’re on your own if you want to change the sheets.”

Liv snorted, an indelicate sound that May couldn’t believe she was still attracted to. “I think I’ll just sleep here.”

“If I fall over you trying to get coffee in the morning, you’ll only have yourself to blame.” On that note, May struggled to her feet. Liv’s hand drifted out, and she dragged the tips of her fingers across May’s bare ankle.

“I really do miss you.”

“I know.”

May went to bed, but first she brought back a pillow and blanket to tuck Liv in, right there on that cold floor. Liv never did make the best decisions. May couldn’t say she always did, either.

In the morning, Liv was gone, but the empty bottles and empty mugs gone sticky with the residue of the wine remained. May rinsed out the bottles and put them out with the recycling. The mugs, she washed by hand. They went back into the cabinet, hers and Liv’s nestled blue and tan together with Peter’s bright red tucked behind.

May always did have trouble letting go.


End file.
